Forget Me Knot

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh. Both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time; and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can re-visit and display at will. Forget Me Knot combines two series exploring the intriguing cloth bundles of India’s archives. In “Pothi Khana” (Hindi for “archive room”), Singh presents black-and-white photographs of India’s seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain as secret and distant to Singh as to us, known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in her images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. “Time Measures” marks the first time Singh has made portraits of the archive bundles, photographing them individually and close-up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached red patterns, the varying shapes and knots (tied and re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within. Forget Me Knot invites a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people’s faces and bodies; it is her latest expression of the book as a suggestive, self-determined space, both material and imagined.